Rajeev Motwani

Rajeev Motwani (Hindi: राजीव मोटवानी , 24 March 1962 – 5 June 2009) was an Indian American professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.[2][3][4]

Rajeev Motwani
Rajeev Motwani in 2006
Born
Rajeev Motwani

(1962-03-24)24 March 1962
Jammu, J&K, India
Died5 June 2009(2009-06-05) (aged 47)
Atherton, California, United States
NationalityAmerican
CitizenshipAmerican
EducationSt. Columba's School, Delhi
Alma materIIT Kanpur (B.Tech C.S.)
UC Berkeley (Ph.D. C.S.)
SpouseAsha Jadeja Motwani
AwardsGödel Prize
Scientific career
Fieldstheoretical computer science
data privacy
web search
robotics
computational drug design
ThesisProbabilistic Analysis of Matching and network flow Algorithms (1988)
Doctoral advisorRichard M. Karp[1]
Doctoral students
Websitetheory.stanford.edu/~rajeev

Education

Rajeev Motwani was born in Jammu, Jammu and Kashmir, India on 24 March 1962, and grew up in New Delhi.[5] His father was in the Indian Army. He had two brothers. As a child, inspired by luminaries like Gauss, he wanted to become a mathematician. Motwani went to St Columba's School, New Delhi. He completed his B.Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh in 1983 and got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California, United States in 1988, under the supervision of Richard M. Karp.[1]

Career

Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. He founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search, robotics, and computational drug design. He is also one of the originators of the Locality-sensitive hashing algorithm.

Motwani was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with those same authors.[6] PageRank was the basis for search techniques of Google (founded by Page and Brin), and Motwani advised or taught many of Google's developers and researchers,[7] including the first employee, Craig Silverstein.[8]

He was an author of two widely used theoretical computer science textbooks: Randomized Algorithms with Prabhakar Raghavan[9] and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman.[10]

He was an avid angel investor and helped fund a number of startups to emerge from Stanford. He sat on boards including Google, Kaboodle, Mimosa Systems (acquired by Iron Mountain Incorporated), Adchemy, Baynote, Vuclip, NeoPath Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007), Tapulous and Stanford Student Enterprises. He was active in the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES).[11][12][13]

He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.[14][15]

He served on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

Death

Motwani was found dead in his pool in the backyard of his Atherton, San Mateo County, California home on 5 June 2009. The San Mateo County coroner, Robert Foucrault, ruled the death an accidental drowning. Toxicology tests showed that Motwani's blood alcohol content was 0.26 percent.[16] He could not swim, but was planning on taking lessons, according to his friends.[17]

Personal life

Motwani, and his wife Asha Jadeja Motwani, had two daughters named Naitri and Anya.[18] After his death, his family donated US$1.5 million in 2011 and a building was named in his honor at IIT Kanpur.[19]

Awards
  • Gödel Prize in 2001
  • Okawa Foundation Research Award[20]
  • Arthur Sloan Research Fellowship[20]
  • National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation
  • Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2006[19]
  • Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Bi-National Science Foundation
  • IBM Faculty Award

References
  1. Rajeev Motwani at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. Rajeev Motwani at DBLP Bibliography Server
  3. Rajeev Motwani author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  4. Raghavan, Prabhakar (2012). "Rajeev Motwani (1962-2009)" (PDF). Theory of Computing. 8: 55–57. doi:10.4086/toc.2012.v008a003.
  5. Rajeev Motwani, computer scientist at Stanford; adviser, investor in Silicon Valley, dead at 47
  6. Brin, Sergey; Motwani, Rajeev; Page, Lawrence; Winograd, Terry (1998). "What can you do with a Web in your Pocket?". IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. 21 (2): 37–47. Archived from the original on 10 June 2009.
  7. Alfred Spector, VP of Research (8 June 2009). "Remembering Rajeev Motwani". Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  8. "Craig Silverstein's website". Stanford University. Archived from the original on 2 October 1999. Retrieved 12 October 2010.
  9. Raghavan, Prabhakar; Motwani, Rajeev (1995). Randomized algorithms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-47465-8.
  10. Ullman, Jeffrey D.; Hopcroft, John E.; Motwani, Rajeev (2007). Introduction to automata theory, languages, and computation. Boston: Pearson/Addison Wesley. ISBN 978-0-321-45536-9.
  11. NeoPath Networks Locks Up $6M Equity Financing; August Capital and DCM-Doll Capital Management Lead the Investment 2004-03-08
  12. "Cisco kisses NeoPath products goodbye" Archived 2009-06-10 at the Wayback Machine by Deni Connor, Network World, 2007-04-04. Retrieved 2009-06-06.
  13. Rajeev Motwani, Google founders’ professor and early investor, dies 2009-06-05
  14. 2001 Gödel Prize citation
  15. Arora, S.; Lund, C.; Motwani, R.; Sudan, M.; Szegedy, M. (1998). "Proof verification and the hardness of approximation problems". Journal of the ACM. 45 (3): 501–555. doi:10.1145/278298.278306. S2CID 8561542.
  16. Lee, Henry K. (16 July 2009). "Stanford tech mentor was drunk when he drowned". San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst Communications, Inc. pp. D–4. Retrieved 17 July 2009.
  17. Weaver, Matthew (7 June 2009). "Google founders' mentor found dead in swimming pool". guardian.co.uk. Guardian News and Media Limited.
  18. Google mentor Rajeev Motwani dies in freak accident Archived 2009-06-10 at the Wayback Machine 2009-06-07
  19. "The Rajeev Motwani Building: Department of Computer Science and Engineering". Archived from the original on 22 May 2013. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  20. "Rajeev Motwani passes away". Thaindian. 6 June 2009. Archived from the original on 7 April 2012. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
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